France has the sad privilege to be one of the last countries in the world to be ruled by a “dinosaur”, i.e. a political leader which rose to power in the early part of the second half of last century and has not left that place since. Amongst the sad specimens of that race, one can include Fidel Castro, Muhammar Khadafi or Yassir Arafat. Jacques Chirac, who was a Cabinet member for the first time in 1967 under de Gaulle, can rightfully claim to be a full member of that select club whose main (and only) competence is to grab power and keep it, on the back of the general populace.
To be fair to Chirac, he has been consistently – and mostly fairly - elected and reelected in his various posts, and the French thus bear a heavy responsibility for his continued presence in power. The man is clearly a gifted campaigner, able to run campaigns well suited to the mood of the day (as a Thatcherite in 1986, as a social populist in 1995, on a law and order platform in 2002) and able to make the French people forget that he has been utterly ineffective each time he has actually been in power – and that he has each time been voted out two years later (1976-78, 1986-88, 1995-97, 2002-04*).
How to explain this apparently irrational love of the French for such a manifestly incompetent politician – whom a majority agree should be in jail (this will be the subject of another post)? The mediocrity of the alternatives? Nostalgia for a long-lost (and presumably glorious) past? Pity for a man who made it clear that he would not give up until he reached the supreme job? The feeling that it is not so important? Or the peculiarly French trait to stick it up to others (including other Frenchmen)?
Maybe we should at least care to make sure that we are not the last country with a dinosaur…
* in March 2004, the right was routed in local elections; this reflected the population's annoyance with Chirac and his government, led by Raffarin. As the right still controls the majority in Parliament (in principle until 2007), he stays in power, but his legitimacy has been severely weakened.
